Transcendental poetics: a primer for Internet reading & writing

We are no longer a part of the drama of alienation; we live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. (Jean Baudrillard, "The Ecstasy of Communication")

There is always an Other; and this Other willy-nilly turns interpretation into a social activity, albeit with unforeseen consequences, audiences, constituencies and so on. And, I would add, interpretation is the work of intellectuals, a class badly in need of moral rehabilitation and social redefinition. (Edward W. Said, "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community")

It is my belief that it is somewhere in this messy denial of the thought of poetry that an explanation can be found for the importance of community. That poets do band together...The reason is that only in such communities is the necessary talk of this high, serious realm possible. Such communities tend to build a structure for men (sic) who wish to keep, hold, and record the passionate relation with the outside that the world, the nation, need. This the only place where such talk goes on. (Robin Blaser, "The Fire")

The call to virtual ethics! It's a requirement for responsible e-communication made necessary these days by the Internet's gross heterogeneity & bewildering array of blog-types—a potentially (if not actually) morally messy place where writing behaviours, according to "Social Media Behaviour in a Venn Diagram" (in blogtactic) can range from ADHD to narcissism to stalking—Perhaps envisaging a vital e-"community" (as in Robin Blaser's sense of the term in epigraph) is a necessary first step. Alas, the hope. What Baudrillard has remarkably called an "obscenity" is perhaps the inverse of that ethical call, or a kind of e-writing hostile to community of any sort. That is, the asocial (at times even apolitical) beast we find it today to be. "It is the obscenity, " as he says in his essay 'The Ecstasy of Communication', "of what no longer has any secret, of what dissolves completely in information and communication."

I'd like an ethics of e-writing to try revealing (at least to me) the secret of a wholeness that can't be too easily tampered with.What's at stake is the notion of text itself, about to be reconfigured into E-page technology with the potential to rewrite 'writing' itself. I'd like a return to opaqueness and mystery before the page turns into "display modules" (& real space runs out): a text viable enough to spur bloggers on to a sense of the importance of saying the unified instead of the always more fashionable ruptured text sans syntax, sans author, sans memory. Can e-writers, in short, give themselves the job of eliminating as many of the barriers as possible to this 'new' form? And what would be the mode of attack anyways?More on that later.

I've suggested, after Levinas, that a sense of writerly proprietorship would be necessary. He's provided the term 'transcendental' but it's the impetus and not the substance of the term I need: the obligatoriness, not the uncomfortable strictures to act in a way writers would probably find uncomfortable. Levinas and the pope aren't good friends for nothing. I'm thinking more of the "silent, radical, one-sided and impossible" ideal of ethical behaviour that the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup proposes in The Ethical Demand . Internet ethics must comprise of a spontaneous, uncompromised sense of restoring the integrity of site and the writer/writing that inhabit it: restoring (especially where one doesn't exist) a community of interested, genuinely good stewards of their Internet garden (in the way Jonathan Zittrain suggests here).

We've stacked gnawing imperatives somewhere back in the human genome (not conscience or heart), adaptive (or even assimilable) to writing emergencies such as the Internet creates from time to time (again, see the Zittrain video).They'd send through the system just the right shock-waves &  admonitions to step responsibly onto new ground.The move into somebody's domain has to be principled but not overbearing. To an increasingly contracted (and radically varied) space of Internet communication we must direct all our resources.All the unwieldy theorizing we'd normally associate with rigid (deontological) ethical discourse would just get in the way. Without checks the ethical could be a hindrance to the technical.


It's not concrete moral dilemma we have to do with here anyways:  a creative indeterminacy has run rampant and it's time for a 'close writing' guided by new transcendental imperatives. Away from critical distractions, writing & the writer begin to reinvigorate all those intention-and-practice correspondences that have been discarded. Not with the idea of restoring them; a point of non-return has been reached. It seems almost as utopian as some of the modernist literary projects (like Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Pound's Cantos, etc), and still, just because of the need for accountability the new e-literacy requires, the Internet writer (blogger) discerns in the attempt something of a radical stil nuovo pulsion.

The blog, with its monomaniacal eye always turned out, is bound to be resistant to radical 'accounting'. I suppose it's the problem with Absolutes of any kind, now a technological one, that Blaser says "is careless of relations in the world and tends to become a dreadful, fun-house, mirrored image of Humanity." ("The Recovery of the Public World" in The Fire: Collected Essays ).How can it be otherwise with an Other that is of the author's own mirrored intention and design? Not mimetic but mirrored Humanity. Hardly a new experimentalism and yet nothing could be more extreme. E-text works with astonishing complexity and processes, layered into creative instincts, have to be content with the deadening white planar surfaces they get. 

The blog, if we subject it to analysis, is certainly not an unbiased copy of the world (not the silly reportage made famous, say, by The Huffington Post blog, etc. ) but a rigorous technics adapted to word, visual and sound processing projects: it is the daily register of its own form and contents, and just as interestingly critical (& suspicious ) of  the world of things as avant-garde Art itself. As witness the "obscene" amount of differing data evident online. Even Finnegans Wake wouldn't look too out of place on the Internet.

How to read the blog, if coaxing it out of its headspace is potentially perilous, and then write it? The underlying principle of a transcendental ethics in writing is that care be taken never to overstep/ override the text to which inquiries are directed in a reading (and direct they must be if a writing is to begin). 'Taking care' is, of course, a Levinasian gesture. Which can be demonstrated primarily in a basic application of what I'll call an attributive protocol. To the text, always single & knowable in itself, can be attributed an 'ethics' never independent from a set of potentially verifiable imperatives, ways of calling the author out, and which the reader must at least intuit before he writes.The reader's never a "conquering and voluntary ego" (Levinas, Otherwise Than Being), the sly Derridean nor the lackadaisical flâneur who casually strolls into another's writing ; s/he rather works with a view of reflecting the authorial acknowledgements already made to the text. Its congenial accessibility to an author and a work the reader first must face (again, Levinas): imperatives to be both responsible readers & writers.

Among the most important imperatives to be called out are the following. Firstly, forms and their combinations into genre or even more loosely structured types (like scripture, Gilgamesh, fin de siècle, curriculum theory etc), conjectural or established; secondly,analogy, contrasts, implicative theses-making, processual analyses or any other expository tags for the traditional ends of writing; thirdly, and more controversially, the expressionist or ideational pulls to originary sources, such as Celtic, Marxist or nouveau roman, always present in a work whether acknowledged or not; fourthly, cultural strategies with indices for the recovery (not discovery) of essentially transmissible parts (and their relations, antinomies and concordances); and lastly, and perhaps the ground of all of them, a set of parallel or incongruent reading histories of an author, seen as either a deliberate superimposition or lurking quietly round the edges.

All these serve as a way to scope out, canvas and then prepare a text for that transition from headspace to something that's writable, at last. To something like a 'close writing'. A title, sometimes more properly attuned to the site than even the textual body, may be the first to suggest rules and set a sort of 'lexical positioning' network in motion. Or, at least, intuit a way for an unerring eye to see what's lying just ahead. Take the example of Geof Huth's site dbqp: visualizing poetics, or the mirrored letters of a title that look as if they're about to actualize into text. To see (and visualize, perhaps in the sense of imagining) the possible reconfigurations of material language: already an intention and design, as close to us as the site's own transcendental ("dbqp") Logo. And we haven't even begun to read the blog text yet.

And when we do, randomly but never intentionally beginning with the latest post (Tuesday, November 10, 2009: "The're is No The're The're (or maybe the're is)") we find a loosely re-structured type of a found (or commemorative) poem (imperative 1) with textual commentary, a birthday poem Huth actually began a year ago so that two poems 'virtually' appear in the November 10th post, the first entitled "Bearth: Day”, and second "Water of Life", both appearing together and giving interesting contrastive sides (imperative 2) to a single co-celebratory/co-textualized event.

 In both poems a singleTed Berrigan line is repeated, "Today, I am 49 years, 5 months and 16 days old", both appearing at its end. And because of its 20-line verse limit Huth calls it "vigesimon (vigesima, the plural form), after the fact of its twenty lines."  Really a kind of postmodern variation-on-a-theme technique (that's also weakly serialist in design) The explanation for the number 20 shows Huth as an author who's consciously tied to both expressionist and Mayan (and, as he later admits, Shakespearean) cultural sympathies of his own (imperatives 3 & 4, respectively). In Huth's own words,

Twenty has been an important number to me, for two reasons: 1. It represents the Mayan “full man,” the full count of digits (fingers and toes) of a man, thus the complete man, and more importantly so since the Mayans appear to have had a base-20 numbering system; 2. My twentieth year was the most reckless and difficult of my life, and turning 20 seemed like a irrevocable transformation into the adult I never wanted to be, making my twentieth birthday almost a harrowing experience, and who else has had that ridiculous reaction to twenty? Birthdays neither bother nor please me now, and I expect no untoward reactions to turning fifty next year.

An envisaged work ("project"), with errantly misplaced indices & subsections within of various lengths, is to arise from interestingly incongruous readings by Huth himself of a single point of 'origin' . A face-to-face meeting of poem and literary project (imperative 5). His own remarks on the fractured (irregularities) of the work's projected  The’re title marks an originary return to the transcendental origin of his "dbqp" site: the true Logo(s) of any "visualizing poetics".